Reading Genesis, page 6
Ishtar displays her lapis necklace, God sets His bow in the heavens. There’s genius, even delight, in the fact that the Hebrew writers can borrow a familiar story, follow it closely, and transform it profoundly.
The covenant given to the earth blesses it all over again. Blessing itself in this context is a transformative change in the story, having to do with a central question in both versions, the nature of God or the gods, especially in relation to the created world. There is a long tradition in theology of divine “impassibility,” which teaches that God has no emotions, since if He were capable of anger or pleasure that would mean He was capable of change, including change caused by something outside Himself. The Hebrew Flood narrative is interesting as a meditation on this question. It tells us that God can be grieved and angered, and at the same time that God is and will be faithful, to earth and to Adam. He can change and not change. Immutability is not an inevitable consequence of His nature, as if options were denied Him by philosophical consistency. Rather, as the psalmist says, His steadfast love endures forever. Who is speaking when the God of the Bible makes this unsought, unmerited vow? Point of view is an interesting question in any sacred text. I am content to believe that certain early Hebrews, under the influence of Moses and still pondering the faithfulness of God that they saw in their liberation from bondage, were inspired with a true insight into His nature. Putting impassibility aside, there is a great, and complex, consistency in the divine nature evoked by them. If God does not love kindness and hate bloodshed, He has no stable character as the Father of us all. It would mean nothing that the rain falls on the just and the unjust because grace would be no necessary part of His abundant providence. Impassivity could account for it all. Since the terms of His being within His Creation are wholly of His choosing and are strongly centered on His human creatures, to have a stable character relative to them would require that He be responsive to them. In other words, immutability as an attribute of “the living God” makes Him inconstant, neither righteous nor compassionate. It makes Him inconceivable as the image in which all of us are made because it places Him wholly outside our experience. It is not impassibility but God’s covenanted faithfulness that allows humankind to be what we are, with all that this will entail. What kind of God would bear with us? From this point in Scripture we begin to enter history.
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God has set His bow in the heavens and made His covenant with “all flesh that is upon the earth.” The three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—leave the ark for the renewed world, blessed by God, told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, just as Adam and Eve had been told, “and of them was the whole earth overspread.” The tale of the Flood in its Hebrew iteration arrives at the statement of a central truth, that humankind are a family. Ultimately they share a common descent, a common nature, a common enjoyment of God’s grace in His covenant with all flesh. These insistences, not only that God is one but that humankind is also one, the Adam who is killed, the Adam who kills, and the Adam who avenges the killing, should not be overlooked. However it was that these stories were preserved and interpreted, they reflect a generous awareness of the known world not to be found in comparable literatures. True, the Hebrews had their time in brilliant Egypt, but much of it was a time of bitter slavery. They were surrounded by tribes and nations with whom they struggled and whose pagan influence was a constant problem. Yet they too are blessed in the person of Adam, whose name means humankind, and Eve, “the mother of all living.” When God makes His covenant with Abraham, He says, “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Such breadth of view is never to be assumed of any group. In many readings of the Five Books of Moses and the Old Testament in general, just the opposite is assumed.
The issue arises in the stories of the origins of peoples that complicate this great unity. The fact of familial relationship never guarantees peace or mutual sympathy—Cain killed Abel—but shared descent is as real in these stories as the denials of it and transgressions against it. The story of Noah’s drunkenness introduces a complex conflict involving status among brothers. On several grounds the story is not pleasing. People can be surprised even to find it in the Bible. Noah “drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.” His son Ham saw him naked and warned his brothers so that they would not be guilty of the same unintended offense against their father. Noah woke, somehow “knew what his younger son had done to him,” and cursed not Ham but Ham’s son Canaan, making him a slave to Ham’s brothers, Shem and Japheth. This is very puzzling. Some interpretations take there to have been some kind of gross depravity committed by Canaan in the traditional story that was lost or edited out in the biblical version. The sad fact is that these verses were used for a very long time to prove that slavery that was racial and hereditary had a basis in Scripture.
Perhaps its importance for this purpose has biased reading, and interpreters have found ways to overlook its peculiarities. For example, Ham seems to have been considerate of his father and brothers. If Noah realizes why this would have been necessary and is shamed and therefore angry on waking from a drunken sleep, and if he curses whoever happens to be in sight in an attempt to recover his dignity and authority, then the fact that there is no fault here, only his humiliation, is consistent with common human behavior. It means that the curse was an error and an injustice, and, to the extent that it affected relations within the human family, a calamity. Noah at this point can be compared to his father, Lamech. Both of them exact revenge, Lamech by killing anyone who injures him, Noah by making “a servant of servants” of a boy who has done him no harm. In both cases they are attempting to imitate God and getting it wrong, Lamech because before the Flood God does not avenge or countenance vengeance, Noah because God does not curse Adam or Cain but instead tells Adam “cursed is the ground for thy sake,” and Cain “now art thou cursed from the earth.” After the Flood, the Lord says, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake,” His language recalling the two instances in which He responded to transgression without cursing the perpetrators or diminishing their human standing. Noah does what God will not do. He curses a human being.
Noah is a patriarch, so the issue is again the relationship of father and son. God as father is compassionate and forgiving. Noah is arbitrary and cruel. Whatever a curse might have meant to Hebrew culture at the writing of this passage, there is no reason to assume that the writers meant to affirm this meaning. The Bible tells us in the Fall that the earth we know, with toil and birth pangs and Eden behind us, is not quite as it was meant to be. It tells us again in the Flood and the law that requires a life for a life that it is a long step further from what it was meant to be. This staged progression, in which lesser degrees of reality modify an original state of things that fully expressed God’s will, means that what is actual or customary is always open to criticism, over against the purer standards of a less declined world. We have the example of the restraint, forgiveness, providence, and faithfulness of God, and we have the drunken rage of Noah. Whatever became of Canaan, to suffer the hostility of a powerful man or of society can look and feel very like a curse. To honor a curse, whatever potency it was thought to have, more highly than the blessing God gives through Noah to all people can only be a very grave error.
There is a tendency in biblical scholarship to treat these stories as if they are too primitive to arise from or to sustain a context in light of which they can be interpreted. It seems fair to me to say that the stories of Noah and his father, Lamech, comment on each other in a way that has important interpretive consequences. There are little poems, boasts, attributed to them both. Lamech celebrates his own vengefulness and Noah enacts revenge, cursing the unoffending Canaan three times over. Poetry has a mnemonic function. It preserves itself and its associations. So these little taunts might have been called up from deep collective memory and given authority by the fact that they were old and shared. Or they are framed in the narrative by details that undercut them. God almost despairs of the world on account of violence, which Lamech exults in. Noah’s shame and rage are not inconsistent with his waking from a drunken sleep. Both father and son err drastically in their brutal use of power. For the purposes of understanding these texts it seems very worth remembering that we are Lamech and we are Noah. Unlimited or misplaced vengeance pervades our societies under the name of justice and always has.
Vengefulness has long been taken as a primary trait of “the God of the Old Testament,” and to be sanctified for human purposes by this association. The endless disaster of the enslavement of Africans was said to be aligned with divine will, as revealed in Noah’s impulse of drunken shame. The Epistle of James says, “The tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire.” These small instances show how great crimes are committed among us, by opportunistic misuse of Scripture where relevant and available, and in any case where power overrides all respect for the sanctity of human beings. As James says also, “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” These little episodes can be associated with great and ongoing consequences because human nature and history do aggregate numberless little episodes of anger, cruelty, presumption, and the rest. The Hebrew writers knew how history happens. Theologically speaking, the possibility that, however obscure we think we are, we can be or refuse to be the agents of great harm, seems brilliantly designed to make anyone at all a significant moral actor. The law of Moses will make explicit the fact that life is invested with the kind of meaning expressed in the word righteousness and also the word sin, both having everything to do with our sacredness in a sacred world.
Shem, Ham, and Japheth were the sons of Noah, “and of them was the whole earth overspread.” The genealogies of nations are laid out, seventy of them. The logic behind the groupings is not wholly clear, but the larger meaning, that humankind are one family, is served by the effort to include the far-flung world in this enumeration and by using the number seventy, which means a totality. The descendants of Shem, the Semites, receive more attention than the others, no doubt because much more would have been known about them by the Semitic writers, but also because the great narrative that is about to unfold is centered on them. What this history will mean, that it is the work of the one God and will bless all the families of the earth, is affirmed in this remarkable catalogue. It is a counterweight to the intensity of focus that will fall on Abraham, his family and descendants. It is commendable of the writers and the tradition that they correct against this centripetal movement. The God of Creation is mindful of it all.
If humankind are one family, we might reasonably be expected to have one language. But in fact the great multiplicity of tongues divides us. How has this come to be? The Bible says, after the Flood, that “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” People migrated to a plain in the region of Babylon and set about building a city and a tower in the Babylonian style, “brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.” Presumably burned brick would be far lighter than stone. Slime, bitumen, is viscous, stickier than mortar. With luck and skill, using these materials it would have been possible to make structures that were very tall by the standards of the time, ziggurats, towers with their tops in the heavens. But their height and the materials used in building them would also have made them fragile and have made a collapse spectacular, the stuff of regional lore.
An unstable tower serves very well as a symbol for human overreaching. In the fable that forms around the tower of Babel, the Lord descends to see what the humans are up to and He demolishes the tower. This is a predictable interpretation of such an event. Hubris has its comeuppance. But more than hubris is at issue here. The Lord reacts not to what people have tried and failed to do but to what they might do if nothing deters them—“this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” The Lord sees neither failure nor frustrated intention nor a chastening of presumption in the tower and its destruction but potential for human success in doing the impossible. This is an astonishingly high estimate of human capability. Now that we have split the atom and spliced the gene and sent a kind of emissary into interstellar space we may have some idea of the possibilities the Lord saw adumbrated in the aspirations of early humankind. The story turns on wordplay, appropriately. The word babel meant “gate of God” in Babylonian and sounded like the Hebrew word that meant “nonsense” or “confusion.” The tale is an etiology of the diversity of languages, and a demonstration of the reality of its effect. No doubt it is also an admiring joke at the expense of the Babylonians and their wonderful constructions.
The story is also, and primarily, a statement about God’s relationship with His too-brilliant creatures. The first thing to be noted is that He does not disable them. He scatters them and He disrupts communication among them, impeding the expression of their plans and aspirations as harmlessly as might be, without any intrusion on their human nature.
The story is an etiology of the phenomenon of tribes and nations, as well. The extreme compression and efficiency of a fragment of narrative like this one makes it feel as though it has been turned and turned, considered in every light, but first of all in light of the belief that God is one and that He is loyal to the whole of Creation. The writers, certainly among the first to practice the art of writing in their language, might have made Hebrew the original or the favored language, perhaps the one spoken by God Himself. But in fact they are completely evenhanded. They might have said that humankind spread out and away from Canaan, but they place the tower and city in Babylonia, which is made to embody the whole of humanity, and whose culturally specific practice is made a synecdoche for the flawed cleverness of the species. It is not usual for the phenomena of tribe and nation to be acknowledged without judgment as to greater and lesser, better and worse, whether directly or by implication, but here again there is perfect evenhandedness. We are all one family, every one of us with a genealogy going back to Adam, like the genealogy of Jesus in the book of Luke. The distinctions among us that encouraged separate myths of origin, as among the Greek cities, or a shared origin but without familial relations, as in the Babylonian epic of Creation, are, says this dense little fable, difference for the sake of difference itself, all intended by God in order to tamp us down, to discourage collaboration. Again, this is not punitive, not absolute. Genesis itself demonstrates alertness to the literature and religion of Egypt as well as Babylonia, and appropriates from them, after its manner, quite freely. Are we to understand that God resents human brilliance? Considering the question from the perspective of contemporary history, and speaking in the language of the fable, there are grounds for believing He might fear it for our sake. Our tenure on this planet might have been brief indeed if our peculiar genius had had a more hectic flourishing. As it is, our hopes of survival may depend, in bald fact, on the discovery, somewhere, of a new heaven and a new earth, which our great brilliance makes remotely possible in theory. If God had dispersed the collaborators who made up the Manhattan Project, or any analogous project, this earth might be the better for it, or at least viable in the longer term.
The use of contemporary history in explication de texte amounts to finding fulfillment of prophecy in the Bible, if prophecy is basically an understanding of the one great variable, human nature, what it is and where it tends. Things seem to have taken an especially apocalyptic turn in recent decades, when every one of the proverbial horsemen comes thundering toward us armed with the effects of our presence on the planet, our choices. There are startling moments in Genesis that suggest the overplus of human ability the Babel story names outright, that nothing will be impossible for us. It is important to remember that not only we are threatened by our gifts.
Just after the Fall and its consequences,
And the LORD God said, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever…”
Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
It is a convention of Genesis that God’s thoughts and intentions are sometimes expressed as if to a companion or peer. Here the language suggests a family or community of gods who share a defining quality Adam threatens to acquire. Perhaps this phrasing is used to divert the narrative from saying that Adam might become too much like God Himself, which would not be consistent with the conception of God that pervades the literature. It would be strange that a transgression should bring him to that point. All the same, it is amazing to consider that only our mortality constrains our nature from whatever could complete that broken sentence. Adam is driven out of the garden, yet cherubim and “a flaming sword which turned every way” were set “to keep the way of the tree of life.” Adam is not changed, only prevented.
There is a strange little passage at the beginning of Genesis 6, just before “God saw that the wickedness of man was great” and determined to send the Flood. Chapter divisions are a late addition to the text, and the division here encourages the thought that the intermarriage of “the sons of God” with “the daughters of men” is a part of the wickedness.
However, the passage goes equally well with the genealogy that immediately precedes it, which gives the ages at death of Methuselah, nine hundred sixty-nine years, and Lamech, seven hundred seventy-seven years. In response to these intermarriages, the Lord says that mortals’ days “shall be an hundred and twenty years.” This is another declension. The children of these marriages were “the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.” So the passage accounts for the difference between the great figures of legend on the one hand and humanity after the Flood on the other. As in the matter of the Tree of Life, humankind is inhibited from being whatever it might be by a limited span of years. The Flood and yesterday’s newspaper are there to remind us that what it might be is not necessarily good. Israel will nevertheless continue to have and name its mighty men of valor.
